Television viewership information and viewer behavioral characteristics and information are important factors and criteria for determining the costs and effectiveness of television programs and advertising commercials. Television viewership is currently tracked by various means, most notable of which is the Nielsen rating system which measures rankings by households. These rankings have come to be commonly known as "Ratings". A "Share" represents the percentage of television sets in use.
The demographics which are utilized by Nielsen consist of adults from the 18-49 age group. This age group is one of the most sought after by advertisers.
The Nielsen rating system, however, has come under criticism from industry sources questioning its accuracy and effectiveness of demographic targeting for purposes of determining advertising revenues. Further, existing market research services and measurement procedures can, at best, be characterized as being inadequate for capturing accurate and detailed viewer patterns. As a result of hardware limitations and the communication constraints associated therewith, it has been difficult to incorporate the features of real-time monitoring systems into systems which attempt to formulate behavioral patterns and histories. Most of the systems which have been designed in the past, with this objective in mind, have tended to be application specific and have required customization.
Prior art systems have also been characterized by the lack of sample information, sample size, biases in selecting marketing research samples and errors in data interpretation.